Hands Join in Post-Riot Show of Unity : Demonstration: The 10-mile-long multiethnic event is called a gesture of solidarity. But there was some pessimism on the route.

In native caftans and saffron robes, in Girl Scout uniforms and their Sunday best, an estimated 15,000 Angelenos lined a riot-ravaged, 10-mile stretch of the city on Sunday, singing, praying and waving banners in a demonstration of racial solidarity.

The hourlong event, dubbed “Hands Across L. A., All People One City” and organized by the Interreligious Council of Southern California’s Interfaith Coalition to Heal L. A., spanned 121 blocks of Western Avenue, from Hollywood to South-Central. The multiethnic and multiracial crowd included members of more than 120 religious congregations.

“We are trying to demonstrate that we are one neighborhood, intertwined with one another, and that what happens in South-Central and North Hollywood and Koreatown affects all of us,” said Rabbi Harvey J. Fields, chairman of the coalition. During the program, Fields and other religious leaders also joined the call for more government support for the inner cities.

“Injustice plagues our society,” said the Rev. Cecil Murray of the First African Methodist Episcopal Church. “In this time of crisis, we must act to heal our troubled city.”

Along the route, however, not everyone was as optimistic.

“It’s a little late in the game for holding hands,” said William Marshall, 41, as he stood with his little boy at the counter of a Korean-owned liquor store at 69th Street and Western Avenue, paying for two bags of groceries with food stamps.

“They should have done something like this 20 years ago, before the riots. Maybe this will help, but I’m concerned it’s going to take a lot more than holding hands to feed the people.”

Fields said planning for the demonstration had begun more than three weeks ago, when it became clear that the city “was suffering from a very severe handicap in terms of image.”

The city was being seen--by its citizens and the rest of the world--as “a place where Rodney King got beat up and where Reginald Denny got beat up, instead of a city where people cared.”

Hands Across L. A., he said, was intended to help play up again the positive aspects of the city’s multicultural makeup, while continuing the push for more state and federal dollars.

The demonstration ranged from Franklin Avenue to Florence Avenue, cutting through neighborhoods of every ethnic type.

The Covenant of the Goddess in Hollywood sent a contingent. So did the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Buddhists in saffron robes, Baptists in choir robes, Sikhs and Unitarians and Jews were there. Mothers Against Drunk Driving was represented, as were McDonald’s and Pacific Bell, the Church of Scientology and Girl Scout Troop 1009.

At Wilshire Boulevard and Western, 70-year-old Francis Wagner, a white woman, held hands with her 9-year-old Sunday School pupil, Sandra Osusky, a Filipina, and Austin Brazille, a black man who sings a substantial bass, sang side by side with white soprano Adele Bloom.

“We are wanting to start peace,” said Amos Chang, 42, who stood with his family in front of the Koreatown Plaza. “We are getting together, making a nice country. We are wanting everybody to smile.”